Curd cheese is a very basic ingredient in a lot of austrian dishes and desserts. It is pretty easy to make. The only real hurdle is to get liquid rennet, which you can get this in a pharmacy.
A few notes up front
Liquid rennet is something that you just do not use every day. You can use it to make all kinds of cheese with, though I guess most people won’t do that. Buy the smallest amount you can get and keep it in the fridge. It is quite durable, usually way beyond the best before date.
Butter milk is an alternative to sour milk or sour cream. You can use any of those ingredients, though I prefer butter milk.
Farmers milk (unprocessed milk) is not a must, however the taste and consistency is way better than with processed milk. If you cannot get farmers milk, get non pasteurized whole milk.
Ingredients
- 4l farmers milk
- 3 drops liquid rennet
- 200g butter milk
- 100g water
Instructions
Heat the milk to 25 degrees. Mix in the butter milk and let it rest for 2 hours in a warm environment. (The rest is not mandatory, it will work without.) Mix the water and the liquid rennet and add it to the milk. Stir it. Afterward let the pot rest in a warm environment for about 10 hours.
Note: the temperature highly influences the time for the rest. In summer I only let it rest for about 6h.
Once the rest is done there will be a thick layer of thick mass in your pot. Cut it into squares. Place a kitchen towel into a strainer. Gently move the cut mass into the strainer. Fully cover the mass with the kitchen towel. If possible, weight the towel and the curd cheese mass.
In the next step we want to dehydrate it down to roughly 1/3 of its weight. You can either let it rest in the strainer or hang the towel above the sink, so it looses water faster. Note that you can use the excess liquid (its whey) so you might want to catch it.
